SameName.com

No..no.. don't try to look that up.. it doesn't exist. So, why did I post it? Well, the post about the "Name Lookup" thing (see: previous post) got me thinking...


...oh, yeah... how would it be to start a website (a social networking one, possibly?) that has communities dedicated to people with the same names. You can have different communities within the site for variations of the name game. One dedicated to collecting people with the same first AND last name, one dedicated to just first name, one to just last names (think one big, global "Murty" Family), one dedicated to people who's name works both ways (Palindrome's like Hannah, Ana, Elle, Eve, Bob, Kanak, Nayan, Nitin, Talat..)... and so on...

Hmmm... will have to do some research on this... what do you think?

Idea for a new feature on Blogger

I was surfing through some blogs that I got to through some comments posted by other bloggers on mine. This seemed like a way to find new and interesting blogs (interesting because, more often than not, poeple who comment on your blog tend to have similar interests as you).

If you have used orkut (another online community oriented portal owned by Google) you probably know that as you browse profiles of people, Orkut keeps track of the shortest path from you to the person, whose profile you are looking at. In Orkut, each member maintains a list of friends and when you look at a profile the "trails" are formed by looking at various paths (through friend lists) connecting the two profiles in question.

Now, although blogger does not have the concept of a friends list, we do have comments from other bloggers, and so I wonder if it might be possible to introduce a similar way of providing a "trail of comments" wherever possible? That way, when you reach a blog (and you are logged in) you know what all different paths you have taken to get there in the past...

Idea for a "Projector-Laptop"

This one came up a couple of days ago during a presentation (involving a conventional Projector) at work, and applies a breakthrough technology (not yet deployed as products) to another area.

I came accross this article a while ago, reporting that Seimens Researchers have developed a cell phone with a built-in projector . This surely is a super cool invention that promises to make life a heck of a lot easier for those busy business guys constantly having to setup bulky projectors, and my hats off two the guys at Seimens. But, I was just wondering if this might be one of those scenarios where the value of an invention is increased by simple re-using the technology in a different application.

In short, if it is possible to integrate a projector with a cell phone without significantly increasing its size or sacrificing portability, couldn't the same be done for Laptops?. I think yes! (Listening laptop makers? Maybe whose names start with a "D" and have 2 "L's" ;)).

As always, please feel free to beat the crap out of me, on this one ;-)

The DOT COM Start - Up Worthy Idea...

Alright, first of all my apologies for not being able to do this yesterday! I was a little surprised I got just ONE caustic comment to my last post :P

Anyways, without further do, here it is. The idea that came up during a conversation with my brother is, to develop a search engine that would take in a zip code (and possibly a given mile radius) as input and return a list of gas stations in that area.

What use would that be? Well... here's the real deal. The search engine would have to organize the gas stations is ascending order of gas prices on that particular day!!! Some add-ons could include providing the user with the option of ordering the results either by gas price or by distance from the source zip.

So.... now for the ground work.... WHAT's IT GONNA TAKE? Hmmm... off of my head, I can think of a few scenarios:

1. Have people drive around gas stations on a daily basis and send back information to a central database. Simple, but not the most economical and certainly not scalable.

2. Have a "tie-up" with gas stations (thinking on the lines of mobile phone manufacturers tieing up with service providers) and have them send information to your database. Slightly better and more scalable.

3. (This assumes the existance of networkable databases in gas station systems) Have automated programs (WEB SERVICES, SOAP, XML, WSDL, if you will) extract information from the gas station databases and feed them to yours. Very scalable but, a wee-bit far fetched in its assumptions!

Cool.... I'm out for now, but this thing is gonna sit in my head for SOMEtime :-) Other inputs/ criticism appreciated!

My Idea for a source of energy

Gas prices in the US seem to be on a steady climb nowadays. Buying a hybrid vehicle seems to be the best way to go in the present times. Thinking of this makes me realize the significance of all the research that goes into finding new and alternative sources of energy. The list of alternative sources of energy that are actually being harvested at the moment includes, Hydroelectric, Solar, Tidal, Geothermal, Wind, Biomass and Biogas.

I came up with a workable idea for a new source of electric power. It is not novel in the way power is generated, but it is in novel in the part of the available energy (remember the universal law of energy transformation?) it converts to electrical energy. It all started with me fogeting to carry my Audio Player to the gym. Since, I didn't have any music to listen to while I biked, I got thinking....!!

If you have ever been to a gym, you have probably observed that all the cardio exercise machines, except the treadmills, do not require external power for their operation (if you discount the LED diplays). So, I wonder if it might be posible to use all the human energy that gets expended on the bikes, the elliptical machines and the stepping machines to power the treadmills, and possibly some more?